ABSTRACT
A media culture emerged in the twentieth century in which images, sounds, stories, and spectacles helped produce the fabric of everyday life, dominating leisure time, shaping political views and social behavior, and providing the materials out of which people forge their very identities. This chapter discusses the potential contributions of a media/cultural studies perspective to empower individuals to engage in media critique and to gain critical media literacy. In general, media culture in the twenty-first-century United States is not a system of rigid ideological indoctrination that induces consent to existing capitalist–patriarchal societies, but enables individuals to participate in the pleasure of the media, cyber, and consumer culture. The chapter also explicates a concept of diagnostic critique that uses media culture to diagnose social trends and tendencies, reading through the texts to the fantasies, fears, hopes, desire, and political discourses that they articulate, which he illustrate through a reading of “Superheroes from Wonder Woman to Black Panther.”
